impengo's Journal: School Textbooks and Public Key Encryption

School Textbook cost students over $500 PER SEMESTER. I don't know the answer to this one, but I'll freely share with you what I have thought of so far: At first blush, you would think the books could just be distributed on CDs. This would solve all printing costs, and much shipping and handling. However, this would not solve the problem of people distributing the soft copies free of charge among the students. Books are written by researchers, and they need to be compensated appropriately. When I write an argument on paper, I myself use expensive paper in an unwritten argument that it is a classy argument. If I do not, it is because I can't afford the better paper. School text books likewise are printed on the best paper available, and the cost of paper represents the single biggest expenditure of textbook presses. In foreign countries they economize by printing text books on much cheaper paper without social penalty. Most text books will fit easily on a CD. Textbooks that come with software can usually be made to fit on a DVD. If we in future move to Blu-ray or HD-DVD, we may find that aranging for these to be backward compatible to read CDs or DVDs might be difficult. As it stands, CDs and DVDs use different lasers inside the drive. As such, any future distribution would be subject to limitations if it were distributed in hard copy. If dowloads were to be the mechanism, then the books would have to be photographed by page and sold to people who dowloaded a public key encrypted version. These photographed copies would not be as searcheable as a regular computer texts; printing costs would deter the malicious from printing a million copies and distributing them for free or selling them in violation of copyright. They could be made somewhat searcheable, and then students could "burn" them to whatever media they chose, or print their selected passages themselves. As far as this solution goes, PDF would have to be modified to include Public Key Encryption, and these copies would then become proprietary to the owner of the relevant private key. In order to purchase a book, you would have one private key for your entire book collection, and provide the associated public key to a repository (we already have one in case you need to write the CIA for example.) I know this technology exists, but have not learned to use it yet. At the time money exchanged hands, the seller would download your public key from the repository, and encrypt. You would download it based on a token system, and possibly replace it in future if you had a hard drive crash, based on your public key. Token systems can be abused, but the resulting dowloads would be worthless to people who did not have your private key. *****NOTE ADDED 02/22/08 Moving a copy to another device as a fair use question might be done by allowing the copy to be done for a reduced but non-null fee. We introduced the concept of a public/private key. My content on more than one device might be related by one private key in future, such that my Public key for purchase would make content work with all my devices, not just my PC. In that case, entering the private key into a non-erasable PROM would be critical. This results in a system similar to the Cell Phone SIM card system in practice, but practically more secure.***** I have also written Congressman Sessions with similar concerns on 02/16/08.